Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
6 - Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1998 the distinguished economic and social historian Cyril Ehrlich suggested that the history of the record industry could be divided into five phases. Each of these has been driven by new sound-recording technologies. They are: the recording horn and the cylinder (1877–c. 1907); the acoustic disc (c. 1907–c. 1925); the microphone and electrical recording (c. 1925–c. 1948); tape recording and the vinyl long-playing record (c. 1948–c. 1983); and digital sound and the compact disc (c. 1983–c. 1998). To the last phase may now be added the computer file, such as the MP3 format (c. 1998–). This chapter will examine each of these periods. It will outline the dominant technologies of each phase, their commercial exploitation and related artistic developments, principally in the fields of musical repertoire.
1877–c. 1907
The inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Edison, saw its future as an office machine for dictation. Its mechanical basis was simple: a metal stylus inscribed sounds transmitted through a speaking tube onto the surface of a revolving cylinder, in this instance covered with silver foil, which could then be played back to the listener using the same stylus. Edison patented his invention in 1878, the year after its first presentation, and set up the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to exploit it commercially. Both public and inventor soon lost interest. Three years later, another major inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, together with colleagues, set up the Volta Laboratories to study sound recording and reproduction.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 120 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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